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Novell's WordPerfect Antitrust Suit Ends In Mistrial
According to a Bloomberg News article carried by Business Week, "Jurors said today they were unable to reach a unanimous verdict in Novell Inc.’s antitrust trial against Microsoft Corp. over the WordPerfect computer program. A mistrial was declared by the judge presiding over the case in federal court in Salt Lake City ... Novell sought as much as $1.3 billion in damages over allegations that Microsoft, while developing the Windows 95 operating system in 1994, blocked an element of the software to thwart Novell’s WordPerfect and Quattro Pro programs."
Clippy: I see you are trying to reach a verdict.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Excellent, we got a non-verdict almost 18 years after the events subject to the trial, during which time Microsoft, Apple, and most of the other serial abusers of anti-trust and/or patent law have only maintained or even increased their presence in the market.
I'm satisfied with our justice system. Everything looks totally cool. Everyone else happy?
and it sounds like one guy held up the whole thing. It was an 11-1 vote AGAINST Microsoft. Sounds like we spotted a fanboy!
hey!
Believe it or not WordPerfect's problems with printing persisted at least until the last time I had to deal with it, which was WordPerfect Office X4 in XP about two years ago. I did get it to work, but frankly it was high IT voodoo - not the sort of thing in the range of your average geek. It takes a pretty committed customer to even ask for such a thing. Funny story: it had worked fine for over a year, but then a Windows Update came along that broke printing.
Either the WordPerfect programming team can make an awesome word processor capable of some really brilliant things - but are yet unable to figure out how printing works, or that Windows team really holds a grudge and continues to reverse engineer WP to break printing and other things. Up to the time I was dealing with the problem I would have gone with the latter. Now, not so much.
WordPerfect was bought by Corel, and in 2010 Corel was bought by "Vector Capital" - an investment group well shielded from discovery of who is actually behind it. If I were to venture an opinion about this, many here would be fitting me for a tinfoil hat. Let's just say my estimation of the chances of a commitment to renovation of WordPerfect to serve the obvious demand for the product and create a resurgence of it is effectively nil. WordPerfect is in my opinion really and truly dead.
I honestly believe that if WordPerfect were fixed and released it would generate a lot of sales and give a good return on investment. The people who like it really do like it. But I also believe that ain't gonna happen.
We saw this happen with OpenOffice too. It couldn't fall into worse hands than Oracle. But OpenOffice was open source, so forking was possible and there's hope LibreOffice will be one of the office software contenders in the future. WordPerfect doesn't have that open source feature. It can be killed, and I believe it has been.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Factory workers with 80$ data plans and smartphones? The majority of people have older pcs, a subset of those have iPods that they fill from music on the pc. But they are not browsing the web on a smartphone with an 80$ data plans. Or buying 700$ ipads. The entry point for pcs is much lower and that where most people in the world are.
I dare anyone to read that post and not read it in Tyler Durden's voice.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
I remember being at the Microsoft Professional Developer’s conference (PDC) in 1993 in. I sat behind a row of Word Perfect programming managers. They slept late, came in mid-morning, seemed to think it a great joke that they had been sent out of town on a junket for Windows, which was *never* going to take off. They laughed, passed notes, and dozed, paying little attention as they knew no one would ever want windows for real work. They were looking forward to Disneyland on Thursday night, though.
And so it went for a week of introductions to the MFC.
Two years later, WordPerfect for windows did not seem to be actually written for windows, and wordperfecomplained they had been tricked. To an observer, though, it looked as if they never tired, and then tried to shift blame later.
I spent a month on a jury dealing with a multimillion dollar squabble between a developer and a contractor. Personally, if it had been up to me, I would have taken the money from both of them and awarded it to somebody else completely, but that's not how trials worked.
By the end I thoroughly hated all parties involved.
[A]bort [R]etrial [F]ail
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Yes it is - it's just the lawyers are the 'somebody else' you get to choose from.